Andre
Breton: The Capitalist Conspiracy against Love.
Communicating Vessels:
Translated by Mary Ann
Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris.
University of Nebraska
Press: Lincoln and London, 1990.
At this time, so far as I know,
I was particularly anguished by the disappearance of a woman whom
I shall not name, in order not to go against her wishes. This anguish
had essentially to do with the impossibility for me of determining
the social reasons that were to separate us forever, as I already
knew. Sometimes these reasons occupied the whole space of my knowledge,
already very clouded by the absence of any objective trace of this
disappearance itself; sometimes, despair being stronger than any valid
mode of thought, I would founder in the pure and simple horror of
living without knowing how I could live, how I could continue living.
I have never suffered so much (this is an understatement) from someone's
absence and from loneliness as from her presence elsewhere, where
I was not, and from what I could imagine, in spite of everything,
of her joy over some trifle, of her sadness, or her ennui on some
day when the sky sank too low. The sudden impossibility of appreciating
her reactions to life one by one has always been able to plunge me
to my lowest depths. Still today I cannot conceive that as tolerable,
and I shall never conceive it to be so. Love, seen from a materialistic
point of view, is in no way a sickness not to be confessed. As Marx
and Engels pointed out in The Holy Family, it is not because it discourages
critical speculation, incapable of assigning any origin and end to
it a priori; it is not because it discourages critical speculation;
it is not because love, as an abstraction, 'has no dialectical passport'
(in the bad sense of this word) that it can be banished as puerile
or dangerous. 'What criticism is attacking here,' Marx and Engels
add, 'is not only love; it is everything that is living, everything
that falls directly in the realm of the senses and is part of the
domain of the senses; it is, finally, the material experience whose
origin and goal can never be established in advance.' I was, I say,
like a man who, thinking he has done everything to conjure the fates
contrary to love, has had to yield to the evidence that the person
most necessary to him for a long time had retreated, that the very
object that had been for him the keystone of the material world was
lost.
I had alternately considered this object in its rather peculiar lack
of social equilibrium, and then myself in mine. The single result
was to confirm me in my opinion that only a radical social change
whose effect would be to suppress, along with capitalistic production,
the very conditions of ownership special to it could cause reciprocal
love to triumph on the level of real life, because even though this
love, by its very nature, 'has a certain degree of lastingness and
intensity which causes both persons involved to consider nonpossession
and separation as a great sadness, if not the greatest of them all'
(Engels, The Origin of the Family), yet it happens that it trips up
miserably, in the cases of insufficient preparation of these persons,
over economic considerations that are all the more powerful as they
are sometimes repressed….
…
…But in the same way that
the dream draws all its elements from reality and implies beyond that
the recognition of no other or new reality - so that the splitting
of human life into action and dream, which people try equally to make
us consider as antagonistic, is similarly a purely formal division,
a fiction - so that entire materialistic philosophy, backed up by
the natural sciences, bears witness to the fact that human life, conceived
outside its strict limits of birth and death, is to real life only
what the dream of one night is to the day that was just lived. In
the apology of the dream as a means of escape and in the appeal to
a supernatural life, only a totally platonic will to change is expressed,
from which at the same time it withdraws. To this inoperative will
there is opposed - and above all there cannot be opposed anything
but - a will to transform the profound causes of human disgust, a
will to upset social relationships generally, a practical will which
is the revolutionary will. - And let no one object to me that I have
nevertheless left myself wide open to the most pointless demoralization,
as I myself have tried to show, for a rather extended period: have
I not been the first to say that then, as happens when one is under
the sway of a too violent emotion, the critical faculty was almost
abolished in me? But this time during which I was unavailable having
passed, I ask that justice be done me, nothing of what until then
had always made up for me the grandeur and the exceptional worth of
human love having been essentially compromised. Quite on the contrary,
my first movement was to seek out, while underestimating temporarily
the social misunderstanding, the reason why everything I had been
weak enough to consider as truth had come to grief. Human love must
be rebuilt, like the rest: I mean that it can, that it must be reestablished
upon its true bases. Suffering, here again, is of no importance, or,
more exactly, it is properly considered valuable only to the extent
that, like any other manifestation of human sensitivity, it creates
practical activity. It must help human beings not only to conceive,
as a beginning, of the present social evil, but then it must be, just
like misery, one of the great forces that contend in order that one
day this evil be limited. Lovers who separate have nothing to reproach
themselves with if they have loved each other. Carefully examining
the causes of their disunion, you will see how little, in general,
they were able to command themselves! Here again, progress is conceivable
only in a series of transformations whose duration rather interferes
with that of my life, transformations among which I am acutely aware
of one that must be made urgently - the brevity of this intervening
as a concrete and impassioning factor in the sense of this primordial
necessity that takes the form of urgency - one that will permit the
accession to love and to everything else worthwhile in life by this
new generation announced by Engels: 'a generation of men who never
in their lives will have had to buy at the price of money, or any
other social power, the leaving of a woman; and a generation of women
who will never have been in the necessity of giving themselves to
a man from any other considerations than real love, nor of refusing
themselves to their lover for fear of the economic results of that
abandon.' I know, I say, that there is a task from which a man who
has found himself one day gravely frustrated in this domain can abstract
himself even less than another. This task which, rather than hiding
from him all the others, will, on the contrary, provide him, as he
carries it out, with an understanding that yields a perspective on
all the others - and this amounts to his participation in the sweeping
away of the capitalist world.
Mad Love:
Translated by Mary Ann Caws.
University of Nebraska
Press: Lincoln and London, 1987.
I had just some days earlier
written the beginning text of this present book, a text which takes
full account of the mental and emotional dispositions at that time:
a need to reconcile the idea of unique love with its more or less
sure denial in the present social framework, the need to prove that
a solution, more than sufficient, indeed in excess of the vital problems,
can always be expected when one deserts ordinary logical attitudes.
I have never ceased to believe that, among all the states through
which humans can pass, love is the greatest supplier of solutions
of that kind, being at the same time in itself the ideal place for
the joining and fusion of these solutions. People despair of love
stupidly - I have despaired of it myself - they live in servitude
to this idea that love is always behind them, never before them: bygone
years, lies about forgetting after twenty years. They can bear to
admit - and force themselves to - that love is not for them, with
its procession of clarities, with this look it casts upon the world
from all the eyes of diviners. They are limping with fallacious memories,
for which they even invent the origin of an immemorial fall, so as
not to find themselves too guilty. And yet for each, the promise of
each coming hour contains life's whole secret, perhaps about to be
revealed one day, possibly in another being.
…
…I shall probably consent
to that one day when it is time to establish, as I put it to myself,
that true love is, while it lasts, subject in no way to any noticeable
change. Only a more or less resigned adaptation to present social
conditions will make us admit that the phantasmagoria of love is uniquely
produced by our knowing the beloved being so little: I mean it is
supposed to cease at the instant when this being is no more concealed.
This belief in the mind's sudden abandon, in such a case, of all its
most exalting and rarest faculties, can naturally only be explained
by a usually atavistic relic of a religious education, ready to see
that humans will always be willing to put off the possession of truth
and happiness, to defer any wish for the integral accomplishment of
desire to a fictitious "beyond," which on further scrutiny
turns out to be, moreover - as it has been so well said - only another
"on this side." However much, as I have so often said, I
wanted to react against this way of looking, it is not up to me to
dispense with it all alone, and I shall limit myself today, in passing,
to deploring the continual sacrifices in its honor which, for many
centuries, poets have felt themselves obliged to make. It is the whole
modern conception of love which should be reexamined, such as is commonly
but transparently expressed in phrases like "love at first sight"
and "honeymoon." All this shoddy terminology is, on top
of that, tainted with the most reactionary irony: but I do not intend
to question it further now. It is in fact from the thought of what
happened to me this first day and of my subsequent return on this
occasion to certain already ancient premises (moreover quite inexplicable)
underlying the facts in question that I want a new light to come.
It is only by making evident the intimate relation linking the two
terms real and imaginary that I hope to break down the distinction,
which seems to me less and less well founded, between the subjective
and the objective. Only the contemplation of this relationship leads
me to wonder if the idea of causality doesn't turn out to have run
quite dry. Only by underlining the continuous and perfect coincidence
of two series of facts considered - until further notice - as rigorously
independent, do I intend to justify and advocate more and more choice
of a lyric behavior such as it is indispensable to everyone, even
if for only an hour of love, such as surrealism has tried to systematize
it, with all possible predictive force.
…
The perfect self-sufficiency that love between two beings tends to
cause finds no obstacle at this moment. The sociologist should perhaps
pay it some notice, he who, under Europe's sky, only goes so far as
to turn his gaze, fogged in by the smoky and roaring mouth of factories,
toward the fearfully obstinate peace of the fields. This has not ceased,
and perhaps it is more than ever the time to remember that this self-sufficiency
is one of the goals of human activity; that economic and psychological
speculations, no matter how inimical to each other they seem today,
revolve about it in a remarkable manner. Engels, in The Origin of
the Family, does not hesitate to make of individual sexual love, born
of this superior form of sexual relations that monogamy is, the greatest
moral progress accomplished by humans in modern times. Whatever twist
is given to Marxist thought today on this point as on so many others,
it is undeniable that the authors of the Communist Manifesto never
ceased to protest any return to the "disordered" sexual
relations which marked the dawn of human history. Once private property
has been abolished, "we can reasonably affirm" declares
Engels, "that far from disappearing, monogamy will be realized
for the first time." In the same work he insists several times
on the exclusive character of this love which, at the price of whatever
deviations - I know some miserable ones and some grandiose ones -
has finally found itself. This view about what might be thought the
most exciting topic related to human becoming is nowhere more clearly
corroborated than by the view of Freud, for whom sexual love, even
such as it is already presented, breaks the collective links created
by race, rises above national differences and social hierarchies,
and, in so doing, contributes in large measure to the progress of
culture. These two testimonies which present a conception, less and
less frivolous, of love as a fundamental principle for moral as well
as cultural progress, would seem to me by themselves of such a nature
as to give poetic activity a major role as a tried and tested means
to fix the sensitive and moving world on a single being as well as
a permanent force of anticipation.
…
There is no sophism more deadly
than the one that consists in presenting the accomplishment of the
sexual act as being necessarily accompanied by a falling-off of amorous
potential between two beings, a falling-off which, repeating, would
lead them progressively to no longer suffice for each other. In that
way, love would lay itself open to ruin, to the very extent to which
it pursued its own realization. A still denser shadow would descend
upon life, in a mass proportional to each new explosion of light.
Here a human being would be destined to lose, little by little, its
elective affinity for another; it would be brought back unwilling
to its essence. It would be extinguished some day, a victim of its
own radiance. The great nuptial flight would provoke the more or less
slow combustion of one being in the eyes of the other, a combustion
at the end of which, as other creatures would garb themselves in mystery
and charm for each of them, they would all be free to make a new choice
when they had redescended to the earth. Nothing is more insensitive,
more depressing than this conception. I know of none more widespread
and thereby more capable of representing the present world as a great
misery. So Juliet, continuing to live, would no longer be always more
Juliet for Romeo! It is easy to separate out the two fundamental errors
that preside over such an attitude: one a social cause, the other
a moral one. The social error, to which there is no other remedy than
the destruction of the very economical bases of present society, resides
in the fact that the initial choice in love is not really allowed,
that, to the very extent that it tends to impose itself as an exception,
it evolves in an atmosphere of non-choice which is hostile to its
triumph. The sordid considerations that are set up against it, the
underhanded war made upon it, even more, the violently antagonistic
representations abundant around it, always ready to attach, are, it
must be admitted, readily discouraging. But this love, the bearer
of the greatest hopes that have been translated into art for centuries,
I am hard-pressed to see what could stop it from winning out in conditions
of life as they might be renewed. The moral error that, concurrent
with the former one, leads us to represent love in its lasting, as
a declining phenomenon resides in the incapacity of most people, even
in love, to free themselves from any preoccupation foreign to it,
from every fear as from every doubt, exposing themselves without defense
to the overwhelming gaze of the god. Here experience, artistic as
well as scientific, comes to the rescue, proving that everything that
is built and remains has first required this abandon just in order
to be. Nothing could be more worth an effort than making love lose
this bitter aftertaste which poetry, for example, does not have. Such
an enterprise cannot be entirely successful until on the universal
scale we have finished with the infamous Christian idea of sin. There
has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To
feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it
by others - this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy,
that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence. From
innocence in the sense of absolute nonguilt. If really the choice
was free, it cannot be the one who made it who contests it, under
any pre-text. Guilt starts from that and not from anything else. I
reject here the excuse of habit, of weariness. Reciprocal love, such
as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under
the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful
image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of
my own desire and more gilded with life.
